Venom Director Explains Coming up With a Spider-Man-Less Origin

Seven years after the release of the Tom Hardy-led Venom, director Ruben Fleischer has now opened up about the hurdles he faced while devising an origin story for the alien symbiote without Spider-Man.

In a recent interview, the Zombieland director revealed that he conceptualized everything about the titular anti-hero in 2018’s Venom from scratch, including his design, as the film could not feature the web-slinger due to issues over the character’s rights.

Ruben Fleischer on the unique challenge of Venom’s origin story

During his recent appearance on The Playlist‘s Discourse Podcast, Fleischer opened up about Spider-Man’s absence in 2018’s Venom, noting that it ultimately affected how Eddie Brock was characterized in the writers’ room.

“That was the first real Spider-Man-affiliated movie,” the 51-year-old filmmaker said. “We were all trying to figure out exactly what that wants to be. ‘Venom’ was always defined by Spider-Man—our movie couldn’t feature Spider-Man. So it created an interesting challenge.”

Fleischer then revealed that while the two Marvel rivals could’ve shared screen in the future, he couldn’t have relied on the prospect while putting together an origin story for Venom at the time.

“From my memory of it, [the film] was always distinct from Spider-Man. Maybe there was the possibility of them crossing paths down the road, but inherent to ours was that it couldn’t be defined by that,” he said.

Talking about how not having Spider-Man in his movie affected the costume design of Venom, Fleischer remarked, “It’s funny because in the comics, ‘Venom’ has a spider on his chest, and that’s because he derives from Spider-Man.”

The director continued, “We had to come up with a whole new origin story and actually create a different pattern on his chest, unique for the film, because it wouldn’t have made sense if he had a spider on his chest if he had no affiliation with Spider-Man.”

While Tom Hardy’s Venom and Tom Holland’s Spider-Man could not cross paths during the former’s tenure as the fan-favorite Symbiote, they did share screen time in the post-credits scenes of Spider-Man: No Way Home and Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Although the two sequences did tease a future collaboration between the said characters, such a prospect never came to fruition.

Originally reported by Apoorv Rastogi on SuperHeroHype.

Source: Comingsoon.net